1) Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a feeder for orienting blocks from a disorderly block supply and, more particularly, it relates to a feeder for orienting and aligning blocks in combination with a block spacer.
2) Description of the Prior Art
Rotary disk feeders are commonly used for orienting and aligning items from a disorderly bulk supply, mainly in the food industry (See for instance U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,224,554; 5,044,487; and 5,065,852). Typically they include a disk turning about its axis and are designed to receive the product to be aligned in bulk. The rotary disk is surrounded by a peripheral wall which has a discharge aperture substantially tangential to the peripheral wall. The items oriented and aligned are discharged through the discharge aperture in a single file.
These rotary tables perform well for uniformly sized and mostly short and uniform length items. However, the performance of these rotary tables with blocks having different lengths and/or with relative long items are often inadequate. Several problems typically occur such as blocks wedging at the discharge because the items are pilled on top of each other or are not tangent to the peripheral wall.
These problems often occur in the wood industries where wood blocks need to be aligned and oriented for feeding wood working machines such as finger jointers or scanning equipment, for instance.
Some methods have been tried to prevent the obstruction such as wipers or deflectors to wipe off any portion of the items that exceeds the thickness of the items being processed. However, these methods are inefficient for long items and items having a length dispersion, i.e. having non-uniform or random lengths.
Moreover, for some applications, it is desirable to have a predetermined spacing between two consecutive aligned and oriented blocks.